The Antwerp pogrom

On Easter Monday, 14 April 1941, in occupied Antwerp, some two hundred members of Flemish collaborationist groups came out of the Rex cinema after a screening of the Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew and set off for the Jewish quarter around the central station. Armed with clubs and iron bars, they smashed the windows of Jewish shops and homes and looted them, and then wrecked and set fire to two synagogues, in Oostenstraat and in Van den Nestlei, and to the house of Markus Rottenberg, chief rabbi of the Orthodox congregation Machsike Hadass. Torah scrolls and prayer books were thrown into the street and burned. The event went down in history as the Antwerp pogrom, sometimes called “Antwerp’s Kristallnacht”. Nobody was killed and, according to surviving reports, nobody was injured, but it was the most serious act of collective violence against Jews in occupied Belgium, and it was committed not by the Germans but by local collaborators.

Popular accounts speak of a “collaborationist mob” that attacked two synagogues. That description matches the findings of historians: the perpetrators were activists of the antisemitic league Volksverwering, members of the Flemish National Union (VNV) and its militia, the Zwarte Brigade, of the DeVlag organisation and of the Flemish SS, the Algemeene-SS Vlaanderen. German soldiers were also among those marching or looking on.

The Jews of Antwerp

On the eve of the war Antwerp was home to the largest Jewish community in Belgium. Historians estimate that some 35,000 Jews lived in the city, more than half of the 66,000–75,000 then living in the whole country. Most had arrived from Eastern Europe, especially from Poland, between the wars, and in the 1930s also as refugees from Germany and Austria. Only a small proportion held Belgian citizenship. They were concentrated in the city’s sixth and seventh districts, in the quarter of streets south of Antwerpen-Centraal station, and many worked in cutting and trading diamonds, for which Antwerp was famous the world over. It was a highly visible community, with many synagogues, schools and organisations, in which Yiddish was the language of everyday life.

Antisemitism was present in the city before the war. In 1937 an Antwerp lawyer, René Lambrichts, founded the Volksverwering league (in French La Défense du Peuple), whose paper was modelled on Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer, and from 1938 the organisation received a regular subsidy from Germany. In August 1939 its activists incited anti-Jewish disturbances in the station quarter. Antisemitic slogans were also used in the 1938 election campaign by the VNV and by Léon Degrelle’s Belgian Rex. The Belgian authorities, then defending the country’s neutrality, banned Volksverwering’s paper in March 1940, and in May, after the German attack, Lambrichts was arrested along with others suspected of sympathising with the enemy and taken to France.

The first months of occupation

On 18 May 1940 the Germans entered Antwerp, and ten days later the Belgian army capitulated. King Leopold III remained in the country as a prisoner, the government left for France and then for London, and Belgium was ruled by the German military administration of General Alexander von Falkenhausen. Its civil administration was headed by Eggert Reeder.

The military administration, anxious for calm and for the cooperation of the Belgian civil service, was in no hurry to begin open persecution. On 28 October 1940, however, it issued the first two anti-Jewish ordinances, modelled on the German Nuremberg Laws and issued at the same time as similar regulations in the occupied Netherlands and France. They defined who was a Jew, required Jews to enrol in municipal registers of Jews, barred them from certain professions, including the public service, and ordered Jewish businesses to be marked as such. Between 21 December 1940 and 12 February 1941 the Germans moved some three thousand foreigners, most of them Jews, out of Antwerp to the province of Limburg for forced labour.

At the same time the Volksverwering league revived. Lambrichts returned from an internment camp in France and persuaded the occupiers to let his organisation in particular carry on antisemitic propaganda. From October 1940 the league again published its paper – from March 1941 under the title Volksche Aanval – and organised rallies, exhibitions and film shows. It operated alongside the VNV, the occupiers’ main partner in Flanders, and alongside Rex, which in January 1941 openly declared for Nazism and whose militias had already been attacking Jewish shops in the autumn of 1940.

The film and the screening

The Eternal Jew (Der ewige Jude) was a pseudo-documentary made at the instigation of the propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, and directed by Fritz Hippler. It had its premiere in Berlin at the end of November 1940. It combined footage shot in the autumn of 1939 in the ghettos of occupied Poland with a sequence in which the migrations of Jews were set beside the movements of rats, and it ended with Adolf Hitler’s speech of 30 January 1939 foretelling “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe” should a world war break out.

In Antwerp it was shown by the German Propaganda-Abteilung in cooperation with the Volksverwering league. According to the Kazerne Dossin Memorial, the Antwerp premiere took place on 6 April 1941 at the Rex cinema in De Keyserlei, near the station. Lambrichts preceded the screenings with speeches in which he praised Hitler’s policy and called for the city to be “cleansed” of Jews. Tension had been mounting for days: on 10 April persons unknown smashed the windows of Jewish shops in Lange Kievitstraat, and on 12 April militiamen disrupted a concert at the Ancienne Belgique hall.

Easter Monday

On 14 April, Easter Monday, some 1,500 people came to the screening at the Rex. After the film several activists called on the audience to go “to the Jews”. According to the synthesis by the historian Hannes Pieters, the action was not spontaneous: it had been prepared by a group around Gustaaf Vanniesbecq, head of propaganda and of the Volksverwering militia, and the German Propaganda-Abteilung knew about it in advance and had it photographed. The procession, put by historians at 200 and in some estimates at up to 400 people, set off from the square in front of the station along De Keyserlei and Pelikaanstraat into the heart of the Jewish quarter. The marchers stuck antisemitic leaflets on the windows of Jewish shops, and when the owners protested they smashed the windows and looted the goods. Non-Jewish shops were left alone.

In Oostenstraat the crowd broke into the synagogue of the Machsike Hadass congregation, destroyed its furnishings and ritual objects, and burned the Torah scrolls and prayer books in the street. The synagogue in Van den Nestlei suffered the same fate. Both buildings were set alight. The attackers then went on to Rabbi Rottenberg’s house and set it on fire too; the rabbi and his wife managed to escape. In all, more than two hundred windows and shopfronts were smashed. The firemen called to the blazes were at first unable to get through the crowd, and put out the fires only after about an hour, once the attackers had dispersed.

Police and authorities stand by

Only a handful of Antwerp policemen and German field gendarmes were on the spot, too few to stop the procession. A plain-clothes inspector twice called for reinforcements from the police stations of the sixth and seventh districts, but the officers who arrived merely watched the looting and the fires. According to findings cited by Pieters, the German Feldgendarmerie refused to help, regarding the disturbances as a matter for the city police; other accounts say that it was the German authorities who forbade the police and fire brigade to intervene. Nobody was arrested. The Mayor of Antwerp, Leo Delwaide, could not be found that day, and the city authorities reacted only the following day. A 1943 report by the Belgian State Security Service described the attitude of the mayor and the police as “shameful passivity”.

The German military authorities did not approve of such unauthorised action. According to some studies Reeder was incensed, because street riots got in the way of his policy of conducting persecution quietly, through administrative means, without provoking Belgian opposition. On 16 April windows were smashed in the quarter again, but there was no further pogrom. As late as August 1941 a police report listed shops whose windows had not been repaired.

The comparison with Kristallnacht in November 1938 that appears in the literature concerns the nature of the event, not its scale. In the Reich on that occasion some 1,400 synagogues and prayer houses were wrecked, at least 91 Jews were killed – in reality several hundred – and some 30,000 men were taken to camps. The Antwerp pogrom was far smaller, but it was a sign that the city harboured a milieu ready to use violence against Jews and local authorities with no intention of protecting them.

Its place in the war

The pogrom of 14 April 1941 did not change German policy, but it foreshadowed what was to come. In 1941 the military administration issued further ordinances: on the confiscation of Jewish businesses, a curfew for Jews and the designation of the cities in which they were allowed to live. In the autumn it set up the Association of Jews in Belgium (AJB), the local equivalent of a Judenrat. From June 1942 Jews in Belgium had to wear the yellow star, and from that summer they were deported through the transit camp in the Dossin barracks in Mechelen to Auschwitz-Birkenau. During the great round-ups in Antwerp in August 1942 the local police helped the Germans, and on 28 August, on the orders of its own superiors, arrested some 1,100 people itself. Of the 28 transports that carried more than 25,000 Jews and more than 350 Roma out of Belgium, just over 1,200 people survived the war. About two-thirds of the Jews living in Antwerp were deported, compared with about 37 per cent in Brussels. Historians explain the difference partly by the strength of Antwerp’s collaborationist circles and the compliance of the city authorities, foreshadowed by their conduct in April 1941.

Markus Rottenberg, who had refused to leave the country so as to stay with his congregation, was arrested in January 1943. Thanks to Paraguayan passports obtained by an underground rescue network he was released, but in May 1943 he was sent to the internment camp at Vittel, and in the spring of 1944, via Drancy, to Auschwitz, where he was murdered in the gas chamber immediately on arrival at the beginning of May. After the war Lambrichts was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Antwerp military court and released on parole in 1951.